


What's Good for the Self

by Phritzie



Series: The Woman Dies [3]
Category: Runescape (Video Games)
Genre: Ableist Language, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Animal Death, Discussions of Sex and Kink, High Spatial Intelligence Low Cultural Literacy, Implied Sexual Content, Inappropriate Sexual Behavior, Kink Shaming, Multi, On-Again/Off-Again Relationship, Recreational Drug Use, Stone Identity, Trans!Leela, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Vomiting, Woof Where Do I Start
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-01-29 14:27:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21411667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phritzie/pseuds/Phritzie
Summary: Non-specific therapy can be a necromancer and the horrible coping skills he teaches you.
Series: The Woman Dies [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1516679
Comments: 11
Kudos: 9





	1. The Bullshit

**Author's Note:**

> Second warning for unhealthy relationship dynamics and a note that I won't be tagging relationships until all the chapters are posted. Be careful with yourselful, etc.

He was making a _sound_ today, both new and awful, so intense a disturbance of the air it made her teeth ache. The grinding of naked metal on stone. It stopped when Felix shouldered through a gap in the citadel’s double-doors, shouting some nonsense to declare her arrival.

The racket's creator looked up from studying a fluorescing blue sign, bracing in either hand an enormous turret made up of precariously stacked scaffolding, and beamed.

“Wonderful!” Quivering under the weight, he stood on the outer left of what’d once been a pristine semicircle. “Give me a hand with this, would you?”

The podiums were gone. Shallow holes and glowing paint had taken their place. He’d stripped the court of its finery, upended the throne, and heaped the stage with piles of stonecuts and gold leafing so deftly excised from their old housings, she'd bet they could fit right where they belonged without having ever been missed.

Felix was torn between dual urges to see him crushed or to allay that very fate. She attributed at least one of them to some deep-rooted folkway in her mind. Something about venerating the elderly.

With a jerk the teetering legs of the turret came ringing down on their feet.

Sliske ducked below the lowest shelf of a scaffold to blink at her. They measured each other through the triangular gap.

“I’ve got a question,” Felix said finally. “But you’re fucking it up with whatever fresh stupidity this is.”

He didn’t miss a beat. “I’m redecorating.”

“Alright.” Felix looked around, mostly to placate him, and frowned. “Usually that involves replacing what was there. Like painting with new colors.” He gestured to the blue markings; she ignored him. “Maybe some potted plants.”

“And just how many interiors have _you_ designed, Madam Knows-All?”

_Don’t answer that_. “Well, at least _I think_ decoration involves more than destroying everything remotely appealing or unique about something. But hey.”

Sliske sighed.

Felix braced for some half-coherent lecture.

He surprised her. Instead of swishing around the thought in his mouth and then spitting it at her, he waved away her taunt in his rarer but more lyrical shorthand.

“Not everything beautiful need be gilt to its gussets, darling. I’d be wary of anything that does.”

_Wow._

_Like you?_

No. She wasn't that angry. And as answers went, that was the closest to a handout he ever offered.

If he wanted to play _that_ badly, Felix was prepared to press her luck. She bit into a cheek and leaned on her end of the turret’s base hard enough to make him squawk in disapproval.

“Oh, fine!”

She relented. His tone morphed back into one of gently simmering indulgence. “You’re so terribly impatient. There’s a murderer at large, darling, or haven’t you heard? And even mean old Mahjarrat get nervous about beheadings.”

“Do they.” Nervous wasn’t the word she would’ve used to describe the distinct energy in his summation. _Pleased, maybe._

“Depending on how efficient he proves I may have _guests_ soon.”

_Gleeful._ “It looks like you’re looting the place.”

He smiled at her as though she’d amused him with the very idea. “What use have I for riches?”

In the beginning, their meetings had consisted of explicitly worded statements interspersed with what Felix supposed was best called what it was: bullshitting. Bullshitting the other into a misstep, and bullshitting to mask their own motivations for entertaining the risk of misstepping, because — and she wasn’t proud of this — it made it that much easier to dissect the whole thing later in the privacy of her mind.

_Tit for Tat. _During those dark, early moments, it'd occurred to her that their little game's rules and the hard-earned but ultimately meaningless improvements in her understanding of him it'd won her actually totaled to a waste. There was no true net gain in returning to the citadel. For every point against him she won, he easily won another.

If he’d an endgame at all, the goal wasn't that complicated. He was diverting her attention. His _stated_ reasoning — to relieve some of the mutual stress they’d accumulated in the months following his ‘ascent’ to godhood and her ascent from obscurity — had proven sound. That didn’t mean she was ignorant to the repercussions of accepting his relief. One day he would tire of playing to both sides of the conflict and return to making her life hell again. One day he would do something so bad Felix wouldn't be able to explain further delay to his destruction.

But until then.

It was a floating castle he’d chosen to steal. The property on its own had to rival Varrock’s coffers in value.

“_How should I fucking know?”_

* * *

Very slowly, and with no small limit on the speed she progressed being Sliske’s confoundingly forthright silence on them, Felix learned which topics were off limits.

“I couldn’t say.”

“It’s not worth discussing.”

“Do I look like a prophet?”

Sometimes, she snapped at him for it. “You know you aren’t fooling me, right? This act where you play dumb and I have to just _accept _you won’t budge is getting really fucking dull.”

Sliske hated, among other things she did, when Felix accused him of boring her.

“I fool you with aplomb.” He rolled his die, moved the appropriate number of rows, and landed on purple. “Now that we’ve taken the time to address the obvious, could we please move on to something more enlightening?”

“_Whatever_.” Felix removed a card from the box labeled ‘literature’ and read aloud:

“Which author is best known for their chronicle of a hero’s _legendary shield_—Fuck! Come _on!_”

“That _is_ interesting,” he interjected, euphoric over her continued exclamations. “To a shield, you say?”

“—that's _four times now_!”

“_Four _times? And they found completion with it?”

“You get _the easiest_ fucking questions—“

“I might need a moment to think about this.”

Instantly and maybe a touch obnoxiously, Felix began counting down his thirty seconds at five. “_Six. Seven.”_

When he made like he was trying to peak at the answer on the count of nine she threw the card in his face.

They didn’t talk about work. _If you can call it work. _Instead, they talked about things Felix typically hated to speak of with anyone.

Memories. Childhood. After the first time, Sliske refrained from asking for personal opinions, but her life story fascinated him, and she used that to her advantage where possible.

“Uh, no. Never met my birth parents.”

“You _were_ orphaned,” Sliske hushed wonderingly, nodding as though confirming a fact with himself. “I’m so sorry to hear that. How tragic to be deprived of—”

Secretly horrified by every possible way he could intend to unpack her _deprivation_, Felix stopped him there. “It’s fine. I don’t think about them.”

Once or twice he gave the impression she was allowed to delve into his experiences too. The sheer vastness of them made Felix decline, revisiting the excuse that the limited amount of time he’d apportioned her to unravel just a fraction of their scope was so confronting an edifice she couldn’t bring herself to do it at all.

“How old are you?”

He dropped the yellow tranche of pie he'd been trying and failing to slot in his wheel and cursed mildly, which was uncommon enough Felix counted it as a minor victory.

“Guess,” Sliske replied curtly, hunting for it through his ridiculously ornate clothing. It was stuck between his robe and one of the golden trapezoids on his belt. She didn't tell him this.

“Five thousand.”

His startled laugh made Felix rethink her math. “Eight?”

He gave up on the tranche to stare openly at her.

“…Ten thousand?”

The knot in his throat bobbed. Felix became uncomfortably embarrassed as he started to say something, _didn't, _and then pointed upward.

_More _than…?

“Can I—have a range,” she managed, palming her own wheel, the lone, green tranche rattling around inside.

“Well.”

His pause survived her pride. Felix colored up, suffocating under the foreign mental weight of being so obviously humored by someone whose earliest memories probably predated the invention of comedy.

Sliske noticed. “You're... close?”

_Bullshit. _And that time it tasted bitter. “I'm not.”

“You're not,” he admitted uneasily.

Instead, Felix developed the patience to serve her own agenda on the occasions his mood allowed, like one day in early autumn when he intercepted her in the citadel’s courtyard, begging to do something with his hands.

“You don’t appear in public much,” Felix observed. “For a _new_ god.”

“Ta, darling,” Sliske fired back, almost entirely concentrated on helping her shell chestnuts. “It’s very likely one of them will attempt to kill me.”

His skin seemed immune to their spines. “It would be easier, after all.” She envied the smooth efficiency with which he stripped away each nut's spiteful coat, her practiced skill with a penknife a lame feat by comparison. “And what’s to stop them then? Why, they might even try to kill you.”

Felix shelled and tossed another chestnut into the bucket sitting between them, filling up with his dozens for her every other handful. “Great.”

And then, like clockwork, the inevitable happened.

Felix got used to the bullshit.

“We should go out,” Sliske said one night, apropos of nothing.

There was no delicate way to put it. They were loaded. He was slumped at her feet, head half in her lap, neck balanced on the edge of a seat emblazoned with a pair of rounded wings. She'd secured a position of advantage above him on the podium itself, although his observation that standing on it would've put them at eye level had stuck rather firmly in her thoughts since. Her boot heels rested in the fitted straps he wore on either side of his waist as she drained a bottle he'd produced alongside several others hours ago. It offered an impossibly sweet aftertaste, smelled like the field medicine her father used to sterilize his tools, and could've been a few years old, or hundreds. She didn’t know; she hadn't asked.

Coughing until her throat threatened to reverse paths, Felix slapped down his attempt to pat her back — poorly aimed, inappropriate — like only someone with sincere hatred in their heart and a port wine in their airway could justify.

He’d withheld his question for long enough she’d grown restless of waiting him out in sobriety, the second occurrence in as many weeks. Felix suspected classic manipulation. A test of her ability to endure him. Whatever the cause, she’d had trouble finding anything to appreciate about it until he'd cracked the seal on a third bottle and declined her efforts to share it.

“_Gck_,” a deep breath, “_gods—_fungh—yough!”

Sliske was, among other, difficult to reconcile qualities, an unconscionably warm person, and Felix meant that literally. His cheek burned her knee when he turned to blink his confusion at her. “Hm?” A small, private smile pulled his mouth into a disarming shape. “Speak up.”

Another that was more like sucking down a coal._ “No.”_

“Why ever not?”

So things were looking bleak for her, of a weekend in the sky. But she’d held on to the hope that he'd free her, eventually, like he always did.

“Are you serious?”

A shrewd little twist to go with his secret little smirk. “Of course I’m being serious.”

_Eventually_.

“O-kay. Well, so am _I_—and—_uch_. Gods. No.”

_Any second now._

“Would you at least _consider _the benefits?” His claws rose in the air and he flipped that glorified set of knives at her without a care for how close they were to the arteries in her legs. “It could be very… pleasant. A change of scenery to stimulate my mind!”

That stopped her short for a moment, higher thought persuaded by the temptation of escaping him before two bottles of wine took the reins back. “No! Fuck, I said _no. _What's your question?”

Sliske pouted. And so often. He pouted like birds flew. “You don’t want to be seen with me?”

“I don’t want to be anything with you,” Felix insisted, gritting through another, lighter coughing fit. “This is torture for me.” Suddenly, her fists tightened around air - he'd stolen the port from her. “Hey!”

“Torture for _you_?” Considering claws held it just out of reach. “Well, we _were_ drinking _together._ Which makes something more of our association to me than _nothing_.”

He jerked it further away when she tilted forward after it, clinging to his shoulders. “A pity to disagree this way.”

Felix hadn’t made a sincere grab yet, but that was mostly because changing the orientation of her body from lounging to near-standing had brought a lot of hot, unexpected blood to her brain, and she was regretting the decision. Dread invaded her benign mood. “Sliske. Ask me a question.”

His robe’s purple hood had tangled with his robe's even more absurd collar in a hump of fabric and boning where he'd shucked it off hours ago. Felix grabbed a mixed handful of both when he flung his arms around her legs.

“**_No_.**”

A damp chill started seeping into her pants. Wine filled the hollows of the design on the podium, a fact Felix's free hand registered when she tried to move and couldn't. He had her pinned. An oppressively heavy sack of sulking ego prevented her from doing much more than wiggling her toes until such time he'd sobered enough to realize she'd kill to protect herself from the most minor of actionable misbehaviors.

If she could get her limbs back.

“_No_,” Sliske whispered again, smelling like pears and sugar. _Mocking _her. She'd forgiven his proximity and now he was abusing it to scare her. “I so detest that word, _‘no.’_”

“I’ve noticed,” Felix choked, hauling on her handful of his robe. He hardly budged.

_This is so immature_.

“Get off!”

Eyes slipping closed, Sliske made a sort of soft, obedient noise. He let his chin drop between her thighs, and these things her heart rate immediately mistook as a direct invitation to plummet.

“Darling,” he whispered. “I would love to.”

Call it learned wisdom. Call it gut instinct. Higher thought made a hysterical comeback before she could do something insane, like grind her hips into his nose.

Ultimately, this was a battle she'd fought many times, and Felix fought to win.

That didn't mean it was the most elegant swordplay she'd ever taken a stab at. “You tell me no. Uh, fucking constantly. I don’t like that either. But I listen to you. I respect that I can’t _force_ you to tell me things.”

Felix waded, sloppily but surely, through a nauseating combination of fear and interest.

“And I’m telling you no. Right now. No, Sliske.”

He sighed dramatically. “Just one little trip.” Opened those demonic lights so wide it should’ve been impossible. His breath left the worst kind of chill on her; she very deliberately didn't vocalize a whine. “I want to go out.”

“Anywhere.” Felix tried to pull away as soon as he started rising. “We can. You pick the place, let’s go.”

But the lights rebuffed, “Oh?” and his palms — occupied, she’d believed, with drenching her in alcohol — settled around her middle. “I thought you said _no_.”

Being held felt… so much better than it didn't.

_Gods._

_Fuck._

“Stop that. I’m saying yes.” Aware she was delivering mixed signals hand over fist, Felix swallowed, and so, so alarmingly he fastened on to that before returning to silently accusing her of crimes she hadn’t committed, no matter how guilty she was. “Yes, to a trip.”

“But no to something else?”

Abruptly, she let go of him.

It didn’t happen too often. But Felix could get a genuine glimpse of what people wanted from her, sometimes, when she drank. Constant scanning for microscopic changes in expression and tone ceased — a picture, with bold and distinct colors, would form in her mind — and she heard or saw people for what they meant to say, not what they were projecting.

Felix had glimpsed a truth of intention once before, exhausted and afraid, beneath the psychic projection of random impulses Sliske had tried to sell her. Here, she'd picked up on a feeling, sudden, powerful, that he was leading her - could've been doing for hours, days, weeks.

A feeling he was _guiding _her toward having to talk about ‘_something else.' _

It hit with all the subtlety of a maul. A sparkling white maul made of diamonds.

And with it, the revelation she wanted to talk about it too. Because it was another in-route to dismantling his war games, yes, but also because like this, right now, drunk, thinking as fucking idiots do when cornered on a ledge, the prospect wasn't as disgusting as it clearly should've been.

“Is that your question?”

Sliske stared at her with a face that made her feel like a louse.

Felix stared right back, ready to do exactly what she had to.

In the moment she supposed his rejection confused her.

Later, it pissed her off.

Sliske righted himself with a lurch. Knives released her waist, helped her up. Tickled at the open seam of her lips and didn't hurt at all.

“Not tonight, darling. Let's go out.”

* * *

Scaffolding creaked, a broken wreck, pieces splashed across the ground where they'd landed with magnificent noise after she'd shoved it out of the way.

A bar loosened in the fall snapped off, rebounding a few times, and Sliske twitched heavily. Mouth tightening into a scowl, he taunted her outburst with false dispassion. “Is that your question?”

In the end, they hadn’t addressed the trespass.

Felix had shown him the best places to eat in the city. He’d rewarded her by regurgitating all of it, a facet of his anatomy she could’ve happily gone without bearing witness to for the rest of her natural life.

The alternative exit was probably worse, but whatever lonely, misguided spark of curiosity he’d struck pressing so close in that cold rookery had died when Felix spent half an hour ripping down wanted posters she'd paid to install as he casually retched up a variety of her favorite street fare behind a bench in Weard's Park.

“I need to know what I should do about Armadyl.”

Felix hadn’t seen it for herself. Leela’s secondhand description of the corpse was still an imprint on her mind.

_Big, and for a short time, very high, _she’d joked grimly. _To the Devourer with him._

_Good riddance, _Felix had agreed, sick to her stomach_._

The same claw that'd teased the opening of her mouth closed left the frozen position it'd flown into trying to catch his turret and rubbed furiously at one of the risen spots jutting above his eyes.

“Then ask me what to do, Felix.”


	2. The Suo Jure

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updating the tags as I go.

There were certain rituals to follow.

A pillar on the northern face of the palace was bathed in morning sunlight. Felix supposed it couldn’t be later than a quarter to eleven. The streets below the city's timekeeper were narrow with foot traffic, Ali enticed from their homes and businesses by the promise of mace and toasted caraway. 

Felix had it on good authority that Amina lunched at nine to catch the full on their way back from a maaqouda stall up the street. She'd eaten two already herself, because she could, and because all the other hungers she was sublimating with fried cheese had to wait until sunset at the earliest.

“Yes,” Amina pronounced on entry, reaching across her desk to shake hands. “More cutters today?”

Both the maaqouda and the bundle of rough stones were received with noises of polite restraint. “You can keep the agates if you want.”

“Children adore them,” Amina agreed. "Thank you." She chewed through her midday snack as she parsed out stones of novelty worth and more valuable things that would go behind the counter after they'd been trimmed into artform. Felix had watched her sort chaff from grain before, but it was never any less satisfying. “Your sapphires polished up like beauties.”

Felix stood straighter. “I want those. I've got your money.”

Coin and more packages changed hands. When she tried to slide forward the small measure she'd set aside to pad out the time Amina had lost to take on her commission short notice, the jeweler refused it. Briefly, Felix entertained a fantasy of being precious and pushing the gold and the issue around for a few minutes in reciprocal demonstrations of their modesty, but Amina shot first.

She removed her fancy spectacles. They hung by a silver chain against the minor swell of her chest. Amber red gemstones embedded in each link threw a thousand lights like freckles in the negative across Amina's skin. It was pleasantly distracting. Felix wondered if any of them were hers.

“Buy the settings here,” Amina challenged. “Be one less of the souls Morrisane overcharges.”

It was mild in the south today, but Felix felt her neck begin to heat before she'd even opened her mouth. “No.” There were reasons why Felix bought everything separate. Good ones.

Amina smiled coyly. “Afraid somebody will notice you like to make their woman beautiful?”

With deliberate care, Felix pushed the money back in front of her.

Amina laid a hand over hers.

“Take it for the agates, habibi.” The blush creeping up her collar was going to reach her ears soon. “And don't worry so much.”

Amina sold loose stones, décor, and jewelry in such fantastically erotic variety it drew crowds. It was about that noontime Ali returning from maaqouda and tea would be willing to yield to the eye’s appetite for beauty that she excused herself, tucking the parcel of sapphires into her bag.

Ahlem sold stationery. Ahlem also lunched very late, so Felix killed an hour picking at a green kebab, leading a group of cats with orange spots around by the nose and watching the pillar's shadow shorten. Then she bought a ream of blue paper that reflected bands of lilac when she bent it, and brushed off the remark that she should at least wait to purchase her goods before ruining them.

She revisited the commission of two more artisans in the city. One of them was Louie. Twenty brass links awaited her purse in his storeroom. He was as frustratingly aware of what she would do with his work as Amina, if quieter about it, but he accepted her tip with grace. 

“Good luck,” he whispered.

“Thanks, Ali.” The sun had disappeared from his shop window by the time his books matched hers. “Take care.”

All but the glowing red apex of the pillar was dark as she walked a short mile to Morrisane's. It was a boarding house in a quiet neighborhood, so banging on the front door brought him down in very good time. Muttering, he let her up to his workshop. There a mounted vise and capped inkwells populated the desk he forged his mainstay on. 

After a cursory haggle, Felix agreed to a polite amount of swindling. He sold her shiny backings - squares with four delicate claws, clasps and pins. Also a joke book and some liniment for reasons that escaped her.

“Pliers in that drawer there,” Morrisane said, yawning. “Douse the lamps when you’re finished.”

“Reorganizing?” Felix acknowledged absently, but he'd already gone. She reached for the drawer indicated, mind turning to spacing as she puzzled over how best to utilize the shine of the sapphires, sitting pretty on the cloth they'd rattled around in all day.

Because of their number, Felix had envisioned some sort of anklet, a circle with three or four charms. Sapphires. _Dignity._ Bangles. _The pleasure of your company. _

Now she was dreaming with her hunger, dreaming of blue eyes and black hair. They would look fantastic on her collarbone, sending white, sparkling blemishes across her chest just like Amina's spectacles.

Felix touched her own throat, the width thicker than Leela's. She didn't know what those meant. It would be a surprise, which seemed appropriate. They'd had a lot of those. They were always good fun.

A thrill at the possibilities made her wet her lips. Tick Louie's loose metal links back and forth with a nail.

_Yes._

_I'll make her a choker._

* * *

Someone had installed a new crop of needles, possibly to deter lizards. They sprang from rain gutters and the flowering ornamentation on the balconies. Scaling the eastern wall of the west courtyard toward Leela's bedroom, Felix figured Steve was going to find a way to keep eating them regardless and felt no shame in bending the needles flat.

She pulled her hips above the outer windowsill. Lifted her legs, trading hands. Gently lowered them, slow and steady, until her boots touched the landing. 

Beyond the window the room was black. Fountain mist clung to the sandstone and left a trail of amorphous droplets on the pane when she tapped her finger pads against it, hoping not to rouse a guard.

Silence. She pressed her forehead into the perspiring window. Tried to will movement from the utterly still shapes that framed Leela's possessions.

_Leela_, she thought very hard. _Leeeelaaa_.

“_Felix_?”

Having her name hissed at her like that made her whip around so fast she almost slipped off the balcony.

Breathing light and fast, she glared down at the man wielding a fireplace poker at her, temporarily frozen against the ledge by the fear of falling to death.

Mirza lowered the crude weapon and waved.

Though it was belated enough to be rude, Felix finally unfurled a few fingers to wave in reply.

He smiled with untroubled brilliance, cupping a hand around his mouth to whisper to her, low and sibilant under the white noise of fountains pounding water into the air. “_She isn't home_.”

What? “_Where is she_?”

Clad in his pajamas, the prince of Al Kharid shifted on bare feet as he twisted to look around him for listeners.

He seemed a little scruffier, a little chilled, and not at all unhappy to see her. Felix wondered if she'd given him a serious fright, too.

“_Waiting for game in a blind somewhere_.”

Oh_. That's right._

Meat shortages. They were abounding as the land fouled under the needs and movements of armies unaccustomed to minding their impact. Like any capable hunter in a time of scarcity, Leela was busy feeding her family.

“_Will she return soon_?”

Mirza nodded. “_She’s late, actually. I expect her tomorrow._”

Felix's heart did something that redoubled her grip on the balcony. He beckoned at her to come down. “_Sleep in my room. We'll welcome her together_.”

* * *

There were a handful of seconds in which Felix thought it was possible she'd woken inside a fluffy beast of some size and mild odor.

Mirza throwing back the covers and going “aha!” proved that firstly, he still slept with too many furs for someone living in his climate, and secondly,

“I'd thank you not to feed the rumor mill and leave through his door this time.” 

Leela stood at the end of the bed, beshawled from her shoulders to her knees and holding a belt of brown hares.

“You were out,” Felix argued, or tried to. Sometimes her voice was wrong in the morning. She might've slept with her mouth open. She felt hoarse that way. 

Eyelids limned with long eyelashes lowered in response, and Felix clutched tightly to the feeling of seeing _those_ again, their charges appraising and dark. Thought about trying to say something else in the rough voice, something charming and persuasive.

Leela held the hares aloft, setting their limp ears swaying. 

“And now I'm back.”

* * *

“Did you sleep well?”

The whole palace was out in the courtyard. Ali of the Emirate were building volcanically dense fires scattered with seeds and fruit husks to smoke, of all animals, camel. Mirza had personally taken on the task of rehydrating Leela's hunters. They’d stayed in the working commissary to speak in private, heads together over a pail of coarsely ground salt as they worked it into the hare meat.

“Terribly,” Felix admitted. “Mirza said you were meant to be back sooner, and then he invited me to stay the night in his bed so I could bite myself bloody with anxiety in comfort. You know. Like a good host.”

Hearing her laugh again was nice. The explanation was better. “Dummy,” Leela muttered fondly, packing herbs into the dry hollows of a carcass. “We were fine. Jaya wanted to bring game to Dharf Elid. It’s close and reports say the war’s been hard on trade there.

“Well, we arrive, and they have enough meat, but no oil. At least a day we wasted on arguing over how much to trade, and then this man shows up. Says he'll give us three camels for as much oil as the Emir can spare.”

“Huh.” Felix shook her hands in a bowl of water to remove the grit. “What'll you spare?”

“Up to Mirza, though I suspect he'll be generous.” They were finished; the meat was stored. “Have you been there? It's a wealthy town. Straddles the mouth of the river. And they can't light their homes because those enormous bilkers want to decide who gets to use the fun rock next by obeying that nasty little ratfuck.”

Felix made a horrible noise that shouldn't have qualified as a laugh but probably was. “Are—uh. Are you sticking around for a while?” She opened a cupboard. And then another. _Make that shortages, full stop._

Leela flicked water off her fingers, watching Felix assemble something to eat from the pantry on an empty plate. “Are _you_?”

“I was thinking of having breakfast in your office,” Felix said. Nonchalant as she could manage, loading down the plate with spoonfuls of barrel fruit and pink tomatoes on the vine. “You could join me. For a surprise.”

Leela just looked at her for a while. Then she seemed to snap out if it, nodding. “Give me some time.”

Excuses had to be made. She knew this. They parted, Felix deeper into the palace and Leela to finalize what was to be done to the haul amongst her aides. 

Because anyone interested in eating for the foreseeable future was occupied with some task outside, she didn't anticipate running into Osman. He almost laid her out turning a corner. 

The palace _did_ employ a significant number of transients. People that served in an official capacity but neither lived nor dined there. Of these, Mirza and Leela commanded separate quangos. These people lived on the palace grounds, on the Emir's retainer — Mirza's staff on the upper terrace, where he held court, Leela's in a network of underground estates and Abyssal portals mapped to Al Kharid.

Osman maintained a private retinue of the old guard for himself on the roof. Felix supposed it was difficult to depart the role, knowing everything he did. 

He looked... better. There was _less_ gray in his beard, somehow, and the odd strain between his eyes the Apothecary would've determined permanent had vanished, changes she immediately regarded as fortunate for all the relevant contributions they suggested of his daughter's health in her own dotage. 

_Looking good_ didn’t seem like an appropriate greeting after a year of avoidance, though. And knowing the right thing to say to Osman had always proved impossible. Osman, who had terrified her in youth but was now the picture of harmlessly retired. Osman, generally kind and wanting of grandchildren, taller than her, probably still well-armed—

Felix held up her stolen food and squeezed the muscles in her face until she was pretty sure she was smiling.

He took a tomato, raising his eyebrows at her as they skirted one another in the wide coolness of the hallway. Popped it in his mouth and talked around it as he chewed. “Looking good, Felix.”

Well.

_You're not supposed to be down here anyway._

She escaped uninterrupted by further roaming fathers down the hall. Behind the door. Behind the staircase.

It wasn't fair to hold an old man to impossible standards, and she knew it, but that didn't mean she couldn't.

Thoughts of family and responsibility continued plaguing her while Felix staged the room as had been recommended. When she thought about how Leela would handle abdication she woke the cat where he was curled in a warm circle on his chair.

Steve meowed. Felix waved, incapable of responding in a way he would comprehend. He meowed again and it turned into a stretch. She scratched his head. He whistled at her with his nose.

Leela's office — and it _was_ Leela's office, no matter how Osman might've meddled — sat at the center of an enormous web of influence. Important conversations between important people took place there. Fates were dealt. Of all the rooms he'd been known to mark, Steve's exceptional deference to it and it’s contents couldn’t have been more conspicuous. It was the right choice. Better than she could've planned.

Felix idly rolled a half dozen tomatoes in chutney without eating a bite before Leela joined her on the divan.

Because it was a few hundred feet below ground, Leela's office also didn’t have windows. 

Originally not a fan, she'd come to appreciate that particular feature a great deal.

_Perhaps more so now than ever._

Without the ability to reason her stomach into taking any food, she passed the plate to Leela, who'd contributed roasted corn and greens just beginning to wilt in the heat to their meal.

Felix picked at the corn. Leela ate her tomatoes, offering no conversation but her curious eyes. 

This went on until she couldn’t wait any longer. She reached for where her bag sat by the short, curved legs of the divan. Rubbed it’s tassels together. Opened a side pocket and withdrew the gift. Wondered, as she had for hours, what to say. 

She turned around to Leela stacking their plates and offering her a towel. 

It slipped through her fingers at the sight of the winking blue box.

Bandos was dead.

Leela was her most powerful friend. 

Felix wanted too much. 

There were rituals to follow.


End file.
